Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience ed. by Manning Marable (review)

and morsels ofscholarship when Phillips offers the things which make this book a valuable resource — not an end point, but a starting point — for the neophyte. The edition's very unfortunate physical deformity — the placing ofpages 201-48 between pages 1 68 and 1 69 — is a glaring example ofa lack ofcare on someone's part which is a disservice to Phillips' overall contributions, to Chandler scholarship and the study ofdetective fiction in general, which are to be found in Creatures ofDarkness. Manning Marable, ed. Dispatchesfrom the Ebony Tower: Intettectuals Confront theAfrican American Experience. NY: Columbia University Press, 2000. 333p. Julie Barak Mesa State College The contributor's notes to Manning Marable's Dispatchesfrom the Ebony Tower: Intellectuah Confront the African American Experience read like a who's who in African American Studies. Contributors range from the outspoken Afrocentrist Molefi Kete Asante to the popular, widely read Coronel West, with Amiri Baraka, Henry Louis Gates Jr., John Hope Franklin, Maulana Karenga and odiers sandwiched in between. The depdi and breadth ofthe accomplishments cited in these notes is stunning. In and ofitself, these notes make a statement about the progress ofAfrican American scholars and die development ofAfrican American studies since the inception and inclusion ofthe discipline in U.S. academic environments. These scholars and activists are ensconced in their field, many ofthem iconoclastic role models for up and coming African American studies students. The book is divided into four sections, the first ofwhich I will address last. All three ofthe latter sections serve as thoughtful and provocative introductions and/ or surveys ofthe work and ideas compiled by African American scholars since the 1960s. From the introduction by Marable to the concluding interview with John Hope Franklin, the essays serve as an encomium to W.E.B. Du Bois and his call for the black intellectual to be also an activist, a link between ideas and action, on behalf of the oppressed blacks of the U.S. In section two, "Mapping African American Studies," the contributors, with the obvious exception of the conservative Henry Louis Gates Jr., advocate for a strong activist involvement with the "people" by scholars. Maulana Karenga, for example, observes that "an Afrocentric critique, at its best, requires focus on contradictions in society, especially those ofrace, class, and gender, looking again not only for what is present and distorted in discourse, but also for what is absent, 134 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + SPRING 2001 undiscussed, not only for codified ignorance, but also forcanonized illusion" (67). James Jennings echoes this observation when he asserts that what is most important "in black intellectual thought [is] that scholarship must be in service to social democracy in civic life" (1 78). This section concludes with a debate between Gates and Marable in which Marable has the last word. He concludes that "scholars have an obligation not just to interpret but to act__ We should create new black 'think tanks,' bringing scholars together with representatives of civil rights, labor, women's and poor people's organizations to develop public policy initiatives" (189). Section three, "Afrocentricity and its Critics," continues to sound this dieme. Lee D. Baker claims, "African Americans are consuming and reproducing notions ofAfrocentricity to cultivate a collective identity and challenge the ascendancy of whiteness in U.S. society" (224). Melba Joyce Boyd believes that the African American Studies "movement to penetrate higher education has rendered an alternate intellectualism grounded in activism" (205), and asserts that African American intellectuals are in a position that "can effect change on and off campus , if we initiate it" (209). Those black academics "who are privileged to have the leisure to contemplate must place [their] skills at the service ofsocial movements that critically reflect the lives, experiences, and history ofour people" (214), avers Leith Mullings in her essay "Reclaiming Culture: The Dialectics of Identity ." In the fourth section, "Race and Ethnicity in American Life," Marable discusses ethnic studies more generally, describing the evolution ofnot just African American studies programs, but also ofNative American, Asian American, and Latino Studies programs in our academies. In keeping with the theme ofthe essays from the previous sections, he observes that though [traditional white racism, as configured by class and state forces over...